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Logan gestured to Matt with a sharp jerk of his head. The cowboy nodded, then slipped out the back door. Laila’s mind whirled. Amid the mental chaos, she tried to devise a plan, discarding possibilities and nailing down more viable options while following Trees’s still-moving blue dot. A plot began to take shape.
Minutes later, Matt entered again and stepped aside. Valeria appeared, holding a sleepy Jorge. Kane stood right behind them, on alert, gun in hand.
“Were you followed?” Hunter barked to Kane.
The man with the mustache shook his head. “Hardly anyone on the streets at this hour.”
Hunter and his brothers visibly relaxed as they locked the door.
Valeria ignored them, searching her surroundings. When Laila met her gaze, her sister gave her an imitation of a smile. To fool everyone else? It wasn’t fooling her.
They met in the middle of the room, hugging as if they hadn’t seen each other in weeks, rather than yesterday. Still, with everything that had happened, that heart-to-heart in the apartment seemed like a lifetime ago.
Laila drank in her sister’s familiar comfort, then kissed sleeping Jorge’s head. “What are you doing here?”
“Making sure you finally get a chance to be happy. What have I missed?”
In low tones, she filled Valeria in, aware of the men and their perceptive gazes. As she and her sister put their heads together, Laila outlined her working plan. Granted, it had one giant hole. “But if Montilla will not be satisfied with an exchange of Trees for Victor, I have no other leverage…except myself.”
Without that, the man she loved would die. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words aloud. Terror threatened to shred her composure. She was doing her best to compartmentalize.
“But you do.” Valeria grabbed her hand and led her toward the cluster of plotting men. “Come with me. Tell them your plan. I will fill in details as needed.”
The group fell silent as they approached. Hunter turned to them, looking at Valeria as if she’d lost her mind. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“My sister needs me.”
“We had you in a secure location. And you risked compromising it because you wanted to give Laila a hug?” He pinned her with a glare. “If you have another problem, we’ll absolutely address it, but—”
“I do not.”
“Then with all due respect, you’re making our jobs a lot harder. We need to keep you and your son locked down so we can focus on rescuing our operative.”
Valeria raised a brow. “Will all due respect, if we all work together, we can accomplish what none of us alone are able to, which is not only Trees’s rescue but to stop Montilla once and for all.”
That made Hunter pause. Not that anyone here was naive enough to believe that ending the drug lord would stop the cartel. But it would make Valeria safe, enable Jorge to have a real future, and free the man she loved.
“We’re listening,” Logan said.
“I know where to find Trees.” Laila showed them the blue dot on her screen, now approaching the airport. That was both good and bad. Good because it seemed they meant to keep Trees alive long enough for a flight, which gave her and EM Security time. Bad because they likely meant to take him someplace where it would be much harder to extract him. “Any chance we could reach him before the plane takes off?”
Hunter didn’t reply, simply fired off a text and waited for a reply with toe-tapping impatience.
“I doubt they’re flying commercial,” drawled the younger Edgington. “If they’re going private, that means they’re on their own schedule, so no. Fuck!”
Though Laila had been half expecting that answer, it still crushed her. “Can anyone else stop them? The police?”
“If they go in, sirens blaring, there’s a good chance Montilla’s thugs get spooked and Trees doesn’t survive. The only teammate who could get there fast enough is Zy, but he can’t take on three of Montilla’s thugs without assistance and backup. He’d either become a captive or a casualty, too.”
Hunter’s phone dinged. “Okay, Dad reached out to his friend at the airport. The air-traffic control tower said there’s a private plane due to take off in twenty minutes.”
“Can the tower delay the flight?” Laila asked.
“I doubt it,” Hunter answered regretfully. “They’ve already been pre-cleared and they’re about to pull away from the gate. But Dad did say they’ve filed a flight plan to an airstrip northeast of Mexico City.”
“Geraldo has a residence near there,” her sister supplied. “He also has an operation in the mountains to the east.”
Laila turned to Valeria. How did she know that? From Emilo? Had her late husband shared such things with her?
“So it’s a safe bet that Montilla will have Trees taken to one of those locations,” Hunter said.
Yes, but how would they know which one? “We cannot wait for Trees’s blue dot to settle in a spot before we act.”
“No, and they’ll dump the phone well before they reach their destination. Did you two have an idea how to shut Montilla down permanently?”
Valeria turned to her. “Tell them.”
Laila took a deep breath. “I will write Victor and say that I know he has captured Trees and that I am willing to exchange myself for him.”
Logan scowled. “Why? Victor doesn’t have Trees.”
